A popular job interview question is ‘tell me about your strengths and weaknesses’. Generally, interviewers ask this question to assess what a candidate believes he is good at and whether he knows the areas to work on from a professional standpoint.
However, job seekers generally worry how to admit their deficiency still making a good impression in the minds of the interviewer. But, a bit of advance planning can help job seekers to nail this question with confidence.
Here is a step-by-step guide for identifying and overcoming your weakness:
Make an honest assessment of your personal traits
The First step you will have to take is to conduct a honest assessment of your personal traits. Here, you should assess your job performance abilities and should also identify the jobs that you love to do and do not want to do.
For instance, if you feel staff meetings to be something boring, your weakness may be your lack of patience and focus.
If you do not like teamwork, you might be weak at accepting criticisms from others and you might also not be good at sharing and compromising with others.
Here is how you can find your problem areas:
- Keep track your training results.
- Ask your friends or your spouse. The person should be someone, who should be really open to you and should be trustworthy as well. You should never get any misguidance in this respect. When you ask a person, with whom you are not comfortable with, it can turn out to be a recipe for disaster.
- You can periodically take some tests to judge your standards like the Reintegrate 101 tests. These tests will be helpful and scaling and keep track of your skill levels.
- Record your spending and net asset value. This will help you in identifying, whether you are getting richer or poorer.
The base idea is that what you cannot measure, you cannot improve.
Accept the weakness
Only when you accept your weaknesses, you can take actual steps to get out of the same. You should be true to yourself in accepting your weaknesses and when you put forth the following arguments, it is a sign that you are not ready to accept:
- ‘Everybody does it’
- ‘It does not really matter’
- ‘No wonder, it is because’
If you put forth the above-mentioned arguments, it is the time for some serious contemplation. Remember that if you are not ready to accept your problem areas, you will never take steps to relieve yourself from them.
Love it:
This statement might feel strange. Yes, when you love your weakness and consider it as a prospect to get better, you can surely succeed in your professional life.
This is what Toyota, the great tire maker does. They feel happy whenever something weak or wrong is found in their factory and they begin to celebrate the same as a prospect to make improvement.
So, in addition to truly identifying and accepting your problem areas, it is also important that you should begin to love them.
Break it:
After having followed all the above-mentioned steps, now this is the right time to take steps to get out of your weaknesses. You should take sincere efforts in this regard, so that you can find success coming in your path.
When you are asked about your weaknesses in a job interview, do not specify that you do not have any such problem areas.
When you accept your problem areas and tell the interviewer that you are taking steps to overcome the problem areas and will succeed in your endeavour. This will be impressive for the interviewer that you know your weaknesses.
Do not be in a hurry:
Remember that changing weaknesses will take time and it cannot happen all of a sudden. So, you should be ready to give yourself a break, if you are not in a position to get out of your problem areas.
Remember that you cannot change the spots found in the skin of a leopard, but you can brush the fur to hide the spots and to give a shinier look to the fur.
So, look for workarounds first by developing your skill set. Then, you can look for ways to keep building your strengths.
With dedicated efforts, you can surely turn your weaknesses to be your strengths and can succeed both in your personal and your professional life. Do not keep worrying about your weaknesses, but take steps to get out of them.
